Excerpts from Mason Rudolph Feature

I wrote a feature piece for CBS Sports today on Mason Rudolph’s long journey (literally) from Rock Hill, South Carolina to Stillwater, Oklahoma. I talked to Mason, his dad Brett and his high school coach (and now Clemson assistant) Kyle Richardson.

I had about 40 minutes of tape from the conversations and some fun quotes that didn’t make the piece. I figured you guys would enjoy seeing them, so here they are in no particular order.

Mason Rudolph

• “I really didn’t have that many (offers). I think I had nine when it was all said and done. A couple people came in when I was already committed to Oklahoma State. I was a three-star going through the whole process.”

• “I went to all the college camps and tried to show my self. Elite 11, I didn’t do any of that. LSU was my first one. Oklahoma State and Ole Miss and a few others. We always understood the whole Clemson deal because they had DeShaun committed to them from early on.”

• “Really to me it was Oklahoma State, Ole Miss and LSU. LSU in the back of my mind, Les and Cam Cameron were there at the time, Cam was telling me, ‘Hey, we’re going to change the offense, we’re going to throw the ball around. We’re not just going to be an I-formation team.’ I always kind of thought in the back of my mind that Hugh Freeze would leave the moment he had a 9- 10-win season from Ole Miss, and I’d be sitting there with a new head coach.”

• On what he would tell the next QB from Rock Hill: “Enjoy Friday nights in Football City, USA. Enjoy high school and obviously have a plan and do your homework on colleges and make a good decision.  But save your moments with your buddies and your town. That whole high school football feel — you never get it back, it’s a fun time in your life.”

Kyle Richardson

• “He didn’t have a lot of buzz until the spring going into his senior year when he started getting the LSUs … It picked up really fast. He made his decision in the summer going into his senior year to get it out of the way. There wasn’t a lot of buzz, but then it picked up really, really fast. The buzz wasn’t as big about him as it was about Jacob Park. He was the No. 1 quarterback. All the buzz was about him. People weren’t coming to the state to see Mason first. They were coming to see Jacob.”

• “The kid I had before him for three years was a kid named Justin Worley who went to Tennessee. I had him at quarterback, and all the schools that Mason had, Worley had or had more. We had just gone through that circus with him for three years. He picked Tennessee. Mason and his recruiting was very similar.”

“Their play was very similar. For a while in the national record book, No. 1 and No. 2 is Worley and Mason, and not in that order in every category. You’re talking about a six-year period where you had two quarterbacks that pretty much had identical careers. They both threw 63 TD passes their senior year. Both of them went 15-0 in their senior year. Both of them won the state championship in their senior year. Both of them had LSU in the final three.”

• “The school we were at, you’re talking 7-8 NFL guys. People were coming non-stop through the school. It wasn’t that hard or difficult to navigate through it. The biggest thing is you let Mason drive the car and what he prefers. From there you’re kind of guiding him. Well if you like this then we need to venture over here to these schools.”

• “Deshaun committed so early, and they were in the same class. That’s a no-brainer. South Carolina chose to go a different route. LSU chose to go a different route with an in-state kid. I think Mason would have been a great fit there. He was pretty close to going to LSU, but he didn’t feel like he was as important to their recruiting class as they felt another kid in-state was.”

Brett Rudolph

• “Were he a dual-threat guy, (the offers) probably wouldn’t have been as slow. With a dropback passer, they’re thinking, ‘if this guy doesn’t pan out, what’s he going to play for us?’ It was slow. He had a much better junior year. It was at the end of the junior school year that he committed to OSU. Senior year rolled around, there were still folks mailing. In the early fall, they got off to a great start. Some more schools came back and said, ‘hey, I know you already committed …’ It was never like some guys in this region, Jacob Park being one of them.”

• “I think a lot of people looked at Justin Worley and said, ‘well man he was a great high school player.’ A lot of similarities between he and Mason. He goes to Tennessee and starts for a season, maybe a season and a half. I don’t necessarily blame him. I think the team was in such disarray that it just didn’t go well. Some colleges looked at that. Then the whole air raid, you’re a system guy a system quarterback thing. I think that probably didn’t help him either.”

• “Kyle was great. He was great to have as a head coach. Talk about a blessing. He was a young guy who was engaged and cared about recruiting, really wanted to help his kids. I’ve talked to a number of parents since then that just didn’t have that experience so we’re very fortunate.”

• “I didn’t know who Kyle Richardson was. I had no idea when we moved down here … Rock Hill is a great football town, we had no clue. I didn’t know Northwestern High School was a great football program. We live about a quarter mile from there, and I had no idea of any of that. Meeting Kyle was a neat thing.”

• “Mason came over (as a sophomore) and competed that summer with the senior. The plan during that first game was that they would split time, and they did. Mason almost brought the team back against the cross-town rival, but he did enough in that first game to show that he was the guy. So he started the second game of his sophomore year and never looked back.”

• “We went through the process, and he knew he needed to make a decision early because quarterbacks were committing. This was the end of his junior year. We knew that’s the way the game was played. You better get your spot before there are no more spots. I think he had about six offers at that time. He really narrowed it down to LSU, OSU and Virginia Tech. We knew Frank Beamer was likely to retire soon, and it seemed like that program was in transition. OSU was a long way away, and we didn’t know how we were going to make it work, but we just said, ‘hey it just feels right’ and obviously it was right.”

• “Georgia said they were going to come and check him out. Georgia supposedly at that point in the spring after his junior year, they hadn’t offered anyone other than Deshaun Watson even though he was committed to Clemson. They told us ‘hey you’re on a short list, we’re going to come see you in spring ball,’ and they never came. A lot of situations like that.”

• “Well-documented and a lot of history that LSU, while they’ve had some good quarterbacks over the years, they weren’t really known for throwing the football. That is something he wanted to do. That probably was the primary reason (he chose OSU), I think. He felt like he would have the opportunity to do what he did in high school.”

• “When you go through it, you know all coaches are selling obviously. That’s their job. I played college football. I went through the process so I wasn’t completely foreign to what that relationship looked like, at least what the process was like. All the guys you’re going to like initially. I think a couple of visits, and you get a pretty good feel for whether a guy’s authentic or not. (Mason and Yurcich) hit it off pretty well. I knew a little bit about Mike from doing some due diligence. I’m from Ohio originally, and I knew where he was from at least. But it happened so fast.”

• “We knew that coaches come and go so you better like the school … it was a catch-22 … coaches come and go, but on the other hand we looked at the coaches and said, “Where’s there stability? Virginia Tech didn’t look very stable because of Frank Beamer’s age. They were kind of slipping a little bit. Mike Yurcich had just gotten there, and yet Gundy had already been there. It was a combination of all those things that gave him and us comfort with the decision.”

• “That was new for me. I think I was more used to making a decision on school, program, big picture bit not so specific to position. We did the same thing a lot of people do. We went over the pros and cons. he makes fun of me because I actually made spreadsheets for him where I put the schools there and we tried to look at those pros and cons and look at it on paper. I’d put it in front of him, and he would just laugh at me like, ‘what am I supposed to do with that?’ I don’t know but I’m trying to do something to help you in this process because it’s not easy, and it wasn’t. It’s not.”

• “I was pretty numb at Baylor. I thought ‘this could be disastrous. This could be really bad.’ He didn’t want us to go to the game, and we told him we wouldn’t. But decided that we would go and we did. It was pretty cool when it all went down. We were there, and he came off the field and while we lost which wasn’t good, he showed enough positives I think, and I think the team showed themselves ‘we’re not dead’. He came off the field and saw us. It was a pretty cool moment.”

• “That certainly was a period where ‘I can’t believe this is happening.’ We thought we were going to cruise through this year with a redshirt and ease our way into this deal, and here we are. Certainly the Bedlam game was surreal. It happened fast. We went to one OSU game prior to the Baylor game which was the opener. It’s pretty easy going to a game when your kid’s not playing. You just go and enjoy the game and kind of watch the way it goes. We’ve never had that experience since. We’re thankful that it worked out the way it did.”

• Mason told me to ask his dad about how much athleticism Mason got from his mom (who ran track in high school and college). That got a hearty laugh.

“Well he better be careful now. You’ve seen Mason run, right? If I’m going to give her the credit, I’m not sure I’m giving her much credit. We both wish he had our speed to be honest. We both ran pretty well in our day. He got the arm I guess. She ran track and played basketball, she was a real good athlete actually. High school and also in college. He’s not lying when he says that, we’re just not sure it ever transferred to him yet.”